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May 4, 2011

A Fox News channel claims 'Obama bin Laden dead'.

Modern media works at lightning speed, especially social media such as Twitter. Which may explain the grimly amusing raft of spelling mistakes confusing Osama (bin Laden) and (Barack) Obama. The conflation of the terrorist chief with the American president by a Fox station in California may have struck many as not a coincidence given Fox News's openly critical stance of Obama.

A TV headline at the Sacramento station read: "Obama bin Laden dead". Leftwinger Keith Olbermann, a former host at cable news channel MSNBC, made the same slip – blogging that George W Bush had "deprioritised the hunt for Obama". An MSNBC correspondent tweeted: "Obama shot and killed". In fact, the mistake was so common that in its apology the Sacramento Fox station pointed out that anchors or journalists had also got their Obamas and Osamas mixed up at another Fox station, CNN and ABC News.